Automate versioning and changelog with release-it on GitLab CI/CD

It’s said that you should automate all the things and one of the things could be versioning your software. Incrementing the version number in your e.g. package.json is easy but it’s easier when you bundle it to your continuous integration and continuous deployment process. There are different tools you can use to achieve your needs and in this article we are using release-it. Other options are for example standard-version and semantic-release.

🚀 Automate versioning and package publishing

Using release-it with CI/CD pipeline

Release It is a generic CLI tool to automate versioning and package publishing related tasks. It’s installation requires npm but package.json is not needed. With it you can i.a. bump version (in e.g. package.json), create git commit, tag and push, create release at GitHub or GitLab, generate changelog and make a release from any CI/CD environment.

Here is an example setup how to use release-it on Node.js project with Gitlab CI/CD.

Install and configure release-it

For example the package.json can look the following where commit message has been customized to have "v" before version number and npm publish is disabled (although private: true should be enough for that). You could add [skip ci] to "commitMessage" for i.a. GitLab CI/CD to skip running pipeline on release commit or use Git Push option ci.skip.

In the latter command things are run without prompts (--ci) and patch increases the 0.0.x number.

Using release-it with GitLab CI/CD

Now it’s time to combine release-it with GitLab CI/CD. Adding release-it stage is quite straigthforward but you need to do couple of things. First in order to push the release commit and tag back to the remote, we need the CI/CD environment to be authenticated with the original host and we use SSH and public key for that. You could also use private token with HTTPS.

We are running release-it here with patch increment. If you want to skip CI pipeline on release-it commit you can either use the ci.skipGit Push optionpackage.jsongit.pushArgs which tells GitLab CI/CD to not create a CI pipeline for the latest push. This way we don't need to add [skip ci] to commit message.

And now you're ready to run the pipeline with release stage and enjoy of automated patch updates to your application's version number. And you also get GitLab Releases if you want.

Customizing when pipelines are run

There are some more options for GitLab CI/CD pipelines if you want to run pipelines after you've tagged your version. Here's snippet of running "release" stage on commits to master branch and skipping it if commit message is for release.

Using release-it on detached HEAD

In the previous example we made a checkout to current branch for editing as the runner runs on detached HEAD. You can use the detached HEAD as shown below but the downside is that you can't create GitLab Releases from the pipeline as it fails to "ERROR Response code 422 (Unprocessable Entity)". This is because (I suppose) it doesn't make git push as it's done in manually with git.